“Zeus roars for me,” she growled, “and so none will hear if you cry for help.”
The Wolf’s arms shot out for balance and Ikaros swooped in to steal his blade. He gasped, pitching out into a death drop onto the bay below.
Kassandra reached out to grab him by the throat, the lance tip poised at his side, holding him on twin horns of death. “Now, Wolf,” she spat, edging him out a little farther, “justice can be done.”
“Kill me, then,” he said with a throaty crackle. “But before you do, there is something you must know. I loved you and your brother as if you were truly my own… but you were never mine.”
The storm raged around her and a tempest rose within too. “What do you mean?” She jerked the spear tip a little, drawing blood on his flank.
“That is something you must ask your mother.”
Kassandra felt her soul freeze. “Mother is… alive?”
Nikolaos nodded as best he could. “She is lost to me and me to her, but she lives. She fled Sparta that very night. To where, I do not know. Find her, Kassandra, and be sure to tell her that I have never forgiven myself for what happened. But with every step you take you must beware,” he rasped, his eyes maddened, “beware the snakes in the grass.” He grabbed her spear hand, pushing the lance tip a little deeper into his own flesh. “Now… end this.”
At the last, lightning shivered across the sky and in his bronze Korinthian helmet she saw her own face reflected. Ice crept across her heart, her throat grip slackening to let him fall, her spear arm tensing to run him through. The key to twenty years of caged injustice lay in her grasp at last.
FIVE
The port town of Kirrha sweltered in the June heat, the glare of the sea blinding, the pale mountains rising behind it dazzling. The tracks veining those slopes were dotted with pilgrims trekking into the heights to visit Delphi and its famous inhabitant: the Oracle, the Pythia, the keeper of the wisdom of Apollo, the seeress of all Hellas.
Kirrha’s dock was a riot of stenches and garish colors. Not a single patch of harbor water could be seen, thanks to the hundreds of bobbing rafts, skiffs and small private boats crammed there. Sailors scampered around the decks and scurried up the masts of one boat, tied at a private mooring, tying up its hideous, gorgon-head sail. Pilgrims swarmed over gangways and onto the wharfside, jabbering and singing, looking around in wonder. Merchants yapped and bleated, offering their “sacred” statuettes and trinkets to the passersby. Local children leapt from raft to raft, peddling cool drinks to the thirsty visitors. Smoke columns rose and bells clanged constantly as the crowds waded through the packed streets and onto the pilgrim’s path.
Cutting through the swarms from the private mooring, like a boat moving upstream, was a gold-draped litter.
Elpenor was a cruel man—the kind of man who enjoyed watching his friends fail. He weighed the sack of coins resting beside him in his litter. Perhaps he would divert these funds to his growing fishing business. “I could buy three new boats for my fleet,” he purred, “or… I could pay the toothless crooks at the harbor to scuttle twelve of Drakon’s ships.”
Drakon had been his best friend since childhood, and his wife and daughters even called Elpenor “uncle.” In the early days, Drakon’s family were poor—almost beggars—and Elpenor had enjoyed giving the family a few coins from his business earnings. The enjoyment came not from helping them, but from the feeling of control. Without his small donations, they might not eat. It thrilled him at the time. But Drakon had been overly loud about his gradual change of fortunes: finding a seabream-nesting area out at sea, and using his pathetic little skiff to bring in bounteous catches for months on end. On and on Drakon had bleated about his new boat, then his burgeoning fleet and the wealth he had acquired through it, and no longer did he need Elpenor’s charity. “Decision made.” Elpenor grinned with a venomous twitch. “I hope you are a good swimmer, Drakon.”
His nostrils flared in disgust as a waft of onions and unwashed nether regions rose from the bare-chested pilgrims standing outside the tavern, braying crudely at their own gutter humor. Get into the hills, pay your dues and begone, he cursed them all. He clapped his hands once to quicken his carriers. “Move. I want to be in my villa before noon, before the stink becomes intolerable.”
They cut through a maze of tight lanes and at last came to the edge of town, passing through the iron gates of his estate. The litter was set down, and Elpenor rose, hearing the gentle gurgle of the fountain, smelling the sweet chamomile of his gardens. Stepping inside, he slipped off his expensive leather slippers and enjoyed the feel of the cool white-marble floors on the soles of his feet. He heard the two litter slaves shuffling away and turned to one of them, clicking his fingers. “You, pour some sweet oils into the bathing pool”—his gaze grew carnal—“and wait on me in there. You had better please me this time. I don’t want to have to hurt you again.”
The slave stared into space, nodded once, and did as he was told.
Elpenor stepped into his office, well-appointed with busts and plush seats, a hearth on one side and a colonnade on the other, open to the gardens to allow the blissful song of nature to spill inside. Moving over to the black-and-burned-orange krater on the table, he poured himself a cup of wine and chilled water. It slightly disappointed him that the krater was not empty, for it robbed him of a reason to whip the girl whose duty it was to keep his home stocked with fine drinks and foods. “Now, to the business of the day,” he mused to himself, sipping the cool liquid with a contented sigh. He swung on his heel toward the polished-ash-wood bureau where his tokens and tablets waited. But he took just one stride toward it and froze.
A Spartan officer’s helm sat upon the desk, staring back at him, the transverse crimson crest spread like a peacock’s tail. One-half of the helm was gleaming bronze, the other half encrusted in dried blood.
“First, you will pay me,” a voice spoke from the shadows behind the colonnade.
He sucked in a breath, seeing her now. She paced into view, her face dark. She seemed different from that moment on Kephallonia last spring. Leaner, taller, more confident in her stride.
“And then you will tell me why,” she continued in a breathy drawl.
“Why?” Elpenor said.
“Don’t play games with me. You knew when you sent me on that mission. You knew you had sent me to take my father’s head.”
Elpenor beheld her with hooded eyes and a creeping smile. “If you had known, Misthios, would you have taken the contract?” he said, sliding open a drawer under the table and lifting a small sack of coins, never taking his gaze from her. He plunked the coins down on the bureau dismissively.
“I believe some evils are best left undisturbed,” she replied, stalking wide toward the bureau as if wary of a trap.
“Yet once a hornet’s nest has been shaken, the swarm must be faced,” Elpenor said in a conspiratorial whisper. “He wasn’t your real father, was he?”
Kassandra’s lips twitched, betraying a bestial grimace. “You will tell me everything, you snake. Why did you send me to kill him?”
Elpenor shrugged, sinking back onto a cushioned bench with an affected sigh, sipping his wine, stroking a standing marble statue of Ares by the bench’s end, the war god clutching a bronze spear. “The Wolf was a brilliant general. He would have unpicked Athens’s strategies and defenses before long… and there’s no profit in a quick war, is there?”